New Action Alert: Does NYT’s Jerusalem Chief Have a Conflict?

FAIR has a new Action Alert out, “Does NYT‘s Top Israel Reporter Have a Son in the IDF?” (1/27/10), about the New York Times‘ failure to respond to questions about whether Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s son is enlisted in Israel’s military, and, if so, whether this poses a conflict of interest. If you send a message to the Times about the alert–or otherwise have thoughts you’d like to share about the alert–please make use of the comments thread for this post.

Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

Dear FAIR, I believe you are deep in the nonsense on this. If a journalist can’t cover a conflict because he has relatives in a participating military, what U.S. journalists would cover the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else the United States is involved? Or is it okay for you if it’s your side (the American military) that’s involved?

Bronner should disclose his conflict of interest, or at least acknowledge it. A journalist covering a conflict can in fact sway public opinion about the conflict who otherwise do not know any better about the subject. Especially one whose children are involved in the direct conflict, this just creates more doubt about his coverage. any sane person can see this.

nothing the times does surprises me any longer. look at the op ed pieces and their choices
in writers and its clear that their NOT who they claim to be. haven’t bought it in years.
recently had a rep try to sign me up for home delivery. i said when you report the real news
get back to me. he said he understood. i was really surprised.

Charles Bury: No it’s not nonsense. The NYT times is supposed to be a US publication while the IDF is a foreign army. Secondly, anyone with half a brain knows that in the US corporate media, this goes way beyond Ethan Bronner and his son. Being pro-Israel seems to be a prerequisite to be able to write about it. Indeed, one could say pro-AIPAC. Ever wondered why Maureen Dowd never writes about Israel?

In the past five years I have seen the NY Times, bias with respect to Israel. The Times is very unbalanced in reporting Israeli war issues.
Ethan Bronner’s son is now assumed to be in the IDF, which is a great conflict of interest. I hope that you can change the Jerusalem
Bureau Chief to someone with more even understanding of the policy. This is important to your readers.

Via FAIR I have learned that the Times refuses to confirm or deny that Ethan Bronner’s son is in the IDF on the basis that this is irrelevant to his reporting.

Whether the Times’ foreign editor believes that Mr Bronner’s son’s being in the IDF would affect Mr Bronner’s reporting is of no interest. Readers have a right to make up their own minds about that. If this were 1979 and Mr Bronner was reporting from Northern Ireland, would the Times have arrogantly dismissed the question of his son possibly serving as a British paratrooper in Belfast in a similar manner? I think not.

A puff piece on the late Canadian media mogul Israel ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€¦“IzzyÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ Asper “Lament for Izzy: The fall of an empire” appeared in the October 27 – November 9, 2009 issue of the journal Canadian Business on pp. 82 – 88. Author Peter C. Newman, veteran Canadian journalist and, like the subject of his profile, also a Zionist Jew, raved to his readers about what a savvy entrepreneur the late “Izzy” Asper had been – even as Newman noted that the $4-billion debt that Asper had saddled his company Canwest with turned out to have been one that was completely unsustainable, especially in the currently very dismal economic climate. Indeed, ince Newman\’s article has appeared, a consortium of banks has seized control of the now bankrupt Asper media empire. This paragraph appears on p. 84 of the Newman article:

When he [Asper]grabbed control of the Southam newspaper chain in 2000, it included publishers, editors and columnists not willing to toe his party line. That he could not tolerate. He recognized no reason for owning publications unless they reflected his personal points of view. “Every Southam editor, reporter, columnist, etc. is now on notice and will be fired for provable causes if there is a deviation. The Jews of Silence, the Don’t-Make-Wavers are howling that I am destroying our ‘goodwill’ with these hysterical diatribes. While the Jews of Vigour are chanting. ‘Go get ‘em Rover. Woof! Woof!'” (From a private e-mail sent after Izzy laid down the line his publications had to follow on Israel.)

As you can see, Asper actually insisted that his media group serve as a propaganda tool for Israel. As a result, up here in Canada, Asper’s media empire was hardly a by-word for journalistic objectivity; and its reporting of Middle East news was widely regarded as very suspect and devoid of objectity ; in fact, the Reuters news agency was moved to insist that Asper\’s media group remove forthwith the Reuters name from its Reuters-sourced stories because of very typically Israel-friendly editing they were subjected to by Asper\’s news editors.

I mention this because the New York Times, too, has a growing reputation for lack of objectivity in Middle East reporting. Certainly, having reporter like Ethan Bronner, whose son is now serving in Israel\’s armed forces, will only reinforce that perception of prejudice and bias, and will give rise to a legitimate view of the NYT being in a conflict of interest dilemma.

Suggestion: Why not reassign Mr Bronner to another beat, where such a dilemma of his being in a very apparent conflict of interest won\’t arise?

A puff piece on the late Canadian media mogul Israel ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€¦“IzzyÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ Asper “Lament for Izzy: The fall of an empire” appeared in the October 27 – November 9, 2009 issue of the journal Canadian Business on pp. 82 – 88. Author Peter C. Newman, veteran Canadian journalist and, like the subject of his profile, also a Zionist Jew, raved to his readers about what a savvy entrepreneur the late “Izzy” Asper had been – even as Newman noted that the $4-billion debt that Asper had saddled his company Canwest with turned out to have been one that was completely unsustainable, especially in the currently very dismal economic climate. Indeed, ince Newman\’s article has appeared, a consortium of banks has seized control of the now bankrupt Asper media empire. This paragraph appears on p. 84 of the Newman article:

When he [Asper]grabbed control of the Southam newspaper chain in 2000, it included publishers, editors and columnists not willing to toe his party line. That he could not tolerate. He recognized no reason for owning publications unless they reflected his personal points of view. “Every Southam editor, reporter, columnist, etc. is now on notice and will be fired for provable causes if there is a deviation. The Jews of Silence, the Don’t-Make-Wavers are howling that I am destroying our ‘goodwill’ with these hysterical diatribes. While the Jews of Vigour are chanting. ‘Go get ‘em Rover. Woof! Woof!'” (From a private e-mail sent after Izzy laid down the line his publications had to follow on Israel.)

As you can see, Asper actually insisted that his media group serve as a propaganda tool for Israel. As a result, up here in Canada, Asper’s media empire was hardly a by-word for journalistic objectivity; and its reporting of Middle East news was widely regarded as very suspect and devoid of objectity ; in fact, the Reuters news agency was moved to insist that Asper\’s media group remove forthwith the Reuters name from its Reuters-sourced stories because of very typically Israel-friendly editing they were subjected to by Asper\’s news editors.

I mention this because the New York Times, too, has a growing reputation for lack of objectivity in Middle East reporting. Certainly having reporter like Ethan Bronner, whose son is now serving in Israel\’s armed forces, will only reinforce that perception of prejudice and bias, and will give rise to a legitimate view of the NYT being in a conflict of interest dilemma.

Suggestion: Why not reassign Mr Bronner to another beat, where such a dilemma of his being in a very apparent conflict of interest won\’t arise?

[…] Clark Hoyt (2/6/10) responded to messages from FAIR activists (Action Alert, 1/27/10; FAIR Blog, 1/27/10) by affirming that a reporter covering a conflict in which his child is an armed participant ought […]